Everyone on tumbr is like gay this lgbtq that, and I'm over here just eating so much sour cream ormf ormf ormf ormf ormf ormf ormf ormf romf ormf ormf ormf

nothing more embarassing than when you develop personal beef with a piece of media thats entirely petty. like sorry no i cant talk about that show it. bit me.

yeah dude I'm such a huge Shadow fan

(hates prickly asshole characters) (can't stand it when Shadow flexes) (hates that he will never call Rouge and Omega his "besties") (stuffs him into a capsule for the 100th time) (dangles Maria's memory in front of him like a carrot on a string) (wHy iS hE sO mIsAnThRoPiC omg that's so unattractive) (gives him a gun) (gives him another gun) (endless John Wick jokes) (hates that he "likes nothing" but gives him nothing to do in fanfic because omg that torture-as-backstory tho) (endless "Black Doom is my dad" jokes) (turns him into a '50s greaser) (makes him talk like the Fonz) (portrays Chaos Spear wrong) (never watched the end of Forces)

tags peer-reviewed

“That ability, you might become more fearsome and cruel than I… you know…”

feeling salty today, so.

"the fact he didn't know she was poor"

Backstage's Aubrey does seem to imply the real Aubrey opened up to Sunny more than she did to the rest of her friends, though. I think we can reasonably infer she also opened up about her rough home life to him as part of that.

"Sunny's pretty observant, I think."

Sunny, being the awesome and observant friend he is, apparently did nothing of substance to help.

The game doesn't show him even trying to help. We don't get to see him... idk, maybe bringing Aubrey some decent food since the fridge in her house apparently contains mold. Despite Basil also describing Sunny as "a good listener", we don't get to see any flashbacks that'd have shown him listening to and supporting Aubrey.

The way OMORI's narrative seems to present it, Sunny being a "good listener" basically amounted to him being an equivalent of the rubber duck programmers explain their code to in their attempts to debug it. We get repeatedly told that he's supportive, but nothing of the sort is ever shown, which brings me to my next point

"Wonder if Sunny's subconsciously fulfilled her wants in Headspace to make up for seeing them never filled in the real world."

Even though I recognize that this statement is a fairly neutral one, I want to use it to address something else. I've seen people insisting that Sunny loves his friends and - somehow - using Headspace as evidence.

This sort of argument seems to stem from a particular problem with the game's writing - it often forgets that Sunny's imagination has no impact on reality. The secret post-credits cutscene is emblematic of this since you only obtain it by consistently watering Basil's plants in Headspace, which the game seems to equate to Sunny doing a nice thing for Basil in reality for some reason.

That brings me to my overall point - Sunny giving Aubrey everything she wishes for in Headspace doesn't matter at all. Sunny creating an ideal world for himself and his friends in his head is not indicative of his strong love for them.

Nothing Sunny does in his head matters.

What defines you are your actions, not your thoughts. The game can tell me Sunny loves his friends all it wants, but Sunny's actions (lying to his friends by omission, ruining Basil's photo album, leaving Basil himself alone during the latter's breakdown in the bathroom) simply don't match.

I keep not understanding what exactly are Lenector shippers seeing in their "dynamic". At least they agree that it had poor development, but then what is the appeal?

If you like the abusive, toxic, manipulative, imbalanced, BDSM, "good boy" part of S3, there's none of it in S4. Hector and Lenore talk like good friends, without a hint of their previous sexual tension, unless her puerile dick jokes are what passes as tension now.

If you like them as foils, if you see Lenore as the only person who has ever been kind to Hector, if you think it's romantic that the two want to protect each other in S4, then you have to ignore or justify Lenore's previous physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse of Hector.

And if the appeal is the "development" (which one of these commenters called "enemies/lovers", literally where, Hector was never Lenore's enemy, he was her victim)... then it sucks majorly. There is no development. There's a switch! Like someone changed the radio station! It's jarring! And there is no good way to fill in the gaps without downplaying the horrible things Lenore did to Hector, or without justifying them because "she only meant well 🥺 it was the best solution 🥺", which makes me want to tear my face off my skull.

In fact... Lenore really didn't develop at all. I talked before about Hector in S4, who regressed to the point where he'd want Dracula back just to feel better about his mistakes and never addresses his apathy towards humanity or his tendency to cling to people who give him scraps of appreciation, but a similar thing happened to Lenore. Remember these wonderful lines:

"Oh, shush, you were having fun."

"I'm sorry for everything you went through."

Lenore doesn't care. She doesn't care that she has hurt Hector, that she has used his feelings to lie to his face and force him into an arrangement he hadn't consented to. She doesn't apologize for her own actions. She doesn't even try to explain herself, only retorting Hector's understandable irritation at the ring against him - "well you got hard, what are you complaining about?". Because that's what relationships are in this show: nothing but "cute" banter meant to camouflage abuse.

Oh, she wants to "protect him"? Big deal. She still doesn't seem him like a person who can be hurt by her actions. She still fits the description of vampiric love Carmilla gave in S2. He's still her pet in her eyes, even if she does nothing with it. Nothing has changed. She has just lost sexual interest in him, because now it's no longer fun to put a leash on him and talk to him like a dog. She got what she wanted, so now there's no point in flirting and being nice to him :)

Lenore is nothing more than a power-hungry coward when you read between the lines, less interested in power over the world (which she dislikes) and more in power over singular people. She's happy to beat Hector to an inch of his life when he's weak and in a cell, to prove that she's not to be underestimated, but when she is in a cage, she won't attempt a damn thing to flee it or protect herself from Isaac. She stops molesting flirting with Hector once he gains more confidence, because flirting for her is a mere weapon to psychologically bend someone to her will. After she "solved Hector's problem", she does nothing but whine because she doesn't know what to do, because she feels useless - her spending time with Hector seems nice on the surface, but it might also be seen as her going to be a brat to the only one willing to tolerate her. And, of course, the dialogue frames her choice to kill herself not as her being horrified at her own nature and what it has lead her to do, because villains in this show get to be painted as tragic without doing the work to earn it (*coughcoughdraculaandisaac*), but as her wanting to flee her cage - her position of powerlessness. Not even spending a few more decades with Hector, the man she supposedly has grown to care about and who only wants her in his life, is worth not being in total control.

And the clincher? This doesn't sound bad for a villain! Selfish and pathetic at the same time, under a veneer of "kindness" or "good intentions": that's interesting! And if this had been intended, good job for not spelling it out like I'm stupid, allowing me to put the pieces together? Problem is, the story and its fans insist that actually Lenore is a great person and she really liked Hector no really they should have stayed together and married each other because aren't they so uwu and 🥺 and why couldn't the story give the abusive rapist a second chance 🥺

And I can't see it. I can't. The deeper I look into this story, the more rot I unearth. And it's definitely not because I don't like unhealthy ships; in fact it's precisely because of it that I think this example is terrible. I haven't even touched other issues such as how I don't care for the power imbalance because I'm prevented from caring for the lump of flesh in the shape of Hector in S3 lol.

And to be honest, the more I see fans complaining about the lack of screentime, the more I suspect that the appeal of Lenector is the same as Trephacard's: you get to make shit up in your head and ignore what the screen shows you. Which sure you can do that, but then the actual story doesn't deserve praise, does it?

Dracula is a cruel, merciless ruler, and won't accepted being questioned over his war even by his most respected general.

@woodchipp @the-crow-binary

"There is more proof of Dracula being a nicer person in the games before Lisa's death"

Where? No really, where?

Because he kind of adopted a bunch of orphans? Yeah sure, on the pact that they'd swear alliegence to him and learn a cursed magic, essentially just using them as yet another tool to tell God to get bent

Because we don't see him bathing in the blood of innocents like we see N!Dracula do in that one flashback? Just because we don't see it doesn't mean that we can't infer a similar behavior by virtue of him being a vampire who needs human blood to live. The dude ruined the life of his best friend by having him kill his own girlfriend just to further his own plan and felt no remorse about it, even kind of gloated about it. Do you really think he'd be above doing the kind of crap N!Dracula used to do? He was already calling himself the King of the Night and was welcoming demons of various kinds into his castle, including a succubus who, like you mentioned in another post,was about to get down and dirty with one of his supposed proteges who was 15 years of age

And while you are technically right about the issues between him and Lisa I'd argue that the biggest issue is the lack of actual scenes detailing the relationship. I'm pretty sure the implication is not that Lisa is scared of her husband, but rather that she knows what he used to be and fears he will slip back once hit with such a massive blow. Had the show given us actual chemistry between the two it could've been nice, rather than making it look like Lisa just saw Dracula as some sort of patient to cure rather than a person to love, since, as it stands, the only thing the two seemed to have bonded over was their mutual love for science which, when coupled with Lisa's lack of care for Dracula's actions in the ending, makes her look like a borderline psychopath who cares more about knowledge than people even though the very reason she sought Dracula's knowledge in the first place was to help those in need

And I cannot in good faith criticize the show for going the whole "bad boy/good girl" route because, like it or not, it's one of the few instances of the show being relatively faithful to the games, where Lisa wasn't even a character, just the archetypical angelical woman who's basically a saint and almost managed to rescue Dracula's soul were it not for her death. The main issue there is that we never actually truly see Lisa, so her thought processes about Dracula are unknown to us, but no matter what we cannot avoid the implications that she knew her husband was a monster, it's practically impossible for her to not have known. Hell, the fact that she had to tell Alucard not to harm humans in and of itself implies that she feared the possibility that he might do so in a fit of rage due to his half-vampire nature. Now where do you suppose that fear might stem from?

For all intents and purposes the show's depiction of the relationship should've been better as Lisa was given some actual screentime, it's just that the show's shoddy writing turned that positive into a negative, but some of the fundemental issues that you mention are baked into the very idea that was already present in the games, they were just far less visible due to said lack of screentime

My bad, I meant to say "nicer" than N!Dracula. I know he's still a dick :P

The issue is pretty much what you said. We sadly have very few details of Dracula and Lisa before she was killed. What we do know paint him in a generally gray light - most obviously the idea that he sheltered rejected humans for the sake of teaching them dark arts, a sort of "selfish kindness" if you will. The show had the chance to give us more to really convince us of the idea that Dracula had good in him, especially since the entire angle chosen for him was "tragic complex villain you can't really blame". And they made things even worse.

We don't know if Dracula went on violent killing sprees for trivial reasons. Maybe he did, or maybe he didn't and found other ways to feed (the games, admittedly, gloss over the very concept of vampires needing humans to feed on). We know that N!Dracula did, and even better we learn this in a scene where we're supposed to feel sorry for his depression: that is the thing I take issue with.

(btw, in that scene N!Dracula didn't kill people for the sole purpose of eating, which would be understandable for a vampire. He took great pleasure in dismembering some merchants for "disrespecting" him. It was a show of power. Again, we don't know if Dracula did the same power flexes, but the implication is that he stayed in his own castle 24/7 and he was merely a legend. IGA confirmed that before Lisa's death, Dracula had no issue with mankind in general, only with God, and he lived a peaceful life: N!Dracula was already a misanthrope before he met N!Lisa.)

We don't see the details of Dracula being a kind, loving family man to Lisa and Alucard. The only line we can go with is the arguably-canon Grimoire of Souls where Alucard says that Dracula regained his humanity with Lisa. Same goes with the show because god forbid a flashback gets in the way of N!Alucard being a dick, but N!Lisa's behavior really suggests the worst. Maybe he didn't beat her or yell at her, but I still think that kind of fear should be unwarranted: N!Lisa has been with N!Dracula for nearly 20 years, she made him travel all by himself, she trusted him with a son, but she thinks (and correctly guesses) that one blow would make him regress to the savage impaling beast he used to be? Why did you stay with him, then?

As for Lisa's final words, I don't read them as clear-cut as it is in the show:

ENG: "Do not hate humans. If you cannot live with them, then at least do them no harm. For theirs is already a hard lot."

JP: Do not blame humans. She said that those unable to forgive mankind will walk the path of their own destruction. Those who do not belong to that world shouldn't do anything...

They're very different, even if the core message is the same. In the English version, yes it can be read as Lisa fearing that Alucard might harm people, but she is mainly urging him to find forgiveness and compassion in his heart (yes it's very Jesus of her, I know). In the Japanese version, that's where she acknowledges that her son isn't fully human, but notice that what she's concerned about is not that they'll kill, but that they'll destroy themselves.

But fair enough about Draculisa fitting the archetype in general. Undeniably the series has an issue with the portrayal of women :P I think that what mitigates it is, again, precisely the lack of details, which makes us come up with our own interpretations on what happened between the two.

I could have explained myself better, but I see a difference between "bad boy/good girl" on its own, which can be cliché but inoffensive, and the idea that a good girl's job is to actively try to fix a bad (read: toxic) boy, like the responsibility is only on her shoulders. We don't know if Lisa saw Dracula as a beast to be tamed: maybe she did, or maybe she simply saw his best traits. We know N!Lisa offered herself to teach N!Dracula "some manners". It's explicit that she wanted to fix him, and clearly she didn't do a very good job at it.

I love when the Writing is so Peak that it pretty much gaslights you <3

anyway N!Lisa may be a classist dick but not even she deserves to be married to a man she sees as a devil. what's with this show and trying to paint obviously unhealthy abusive relationships as the cutest thing just because there's some mild banter between them

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It Was Nice While It Lasted… ”Stupid Piece of Shit!” —BoJack Horseman (5/5) To say I love this show would be an understatement. I know the last episode came out back in January, so I’m a bit late, but I spent the first few weeks of covid lockdown finally getting to sketch some Bojack Horseman portraits in appreciation for this weird, soul stirring, wonderful show. I made one for each character. Colored pencil, pen and ink. Nice to finally draw again! Thought I’d share them. <3

“Life’s a bitch and then you die, right?”

“Sometimes life’s a bitch and then you keep living.”

bojack

Balloon Bojack Horseman, 13″

I couldn’t bring myself to make him model accurate because he is as awful as he is funny

Bojack fanart check out my Pinterest user in bio fanartsy board <3

Mr. Blue, don’t hold your head so low that you can’t see the sky.